Escrow is the simple thing. Suppose you want to buy a house or a car, and you show up with a bag of money and someone else shows up with a set of keys. How to proceed without the transaction requiring trust between people who don't know each other? If you physically get the car/house/keys, what guarantees that title was transferred as expected? Depending on the cash volume and the jurisdiction, there is basically no established mechanism for doing this peer-to-peer. If you're "lucky" then you see a whole industry of middle-men created around trying to solve /skim on this, which then increases the costs of transaction (say realtors or car dealerships). If you're unlucky, then there's simply no way to have a trust-free transaction, and you just weigh the risk and take it or leave it.
This does seem solvable, right? Because there's only a few APIs (bank transfers, title queries) that are involved in a fully automatic escrow. Such escrow could be provided as a free service by the government, or it might be pay-per-use (and simply cost less than markup from dealerships/realtors).
This does seem solvable, right? Because there's only a few APIs (bank transfers, title queries) that are involved in a fully automatic escrow. Such escrow could be provided as a free service by the government, or it might be pay-per-use (and simply cost less than markup from dealerships/realtors).